VoIP versus VoPIP – what’s the difference?

One of the most common questions we get asked is, “What’s the difference between conventional Voice over IP (VoIP) and Voxcom Voice over Private IP (VoPIP)?”.

Voice over IP (VoIP) is a seriously exciting technology. It allows for the transmission of telephone calls without using the traditional, monopoly owned telecommunications infrastructure. This helps your business cut costs and enables advanced functionality that would otherwise be too expensive or even technically impossible to implement using traditional infrastructure.

A Warning About VoIP

There is, however, a dark side to conventional voice over IP (VoIP). Most VoIP providers “piggyback” on the public Internet to carry VoIP telephone calls. The Internet is a public network, and not under the control of any single VoIP provider. As such when congestion occurs on the Internet, as it inevitably does from time-to-time, voice quality will automatically degrade as a result. This can result in audio gaps, echo, jitter and drop-outs on telephone calls.

In addition to poor audio quality, using the public Internet for voice calls opens up serious security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities potentially allow hackers to tap your telephone calls, hijack your phone system (to make practically unlimited calls at your expense) and even obtain your credit card details. Using the public Internet for VoIP carriage offers no guarantees of quality or security and as such is not appropriate for business use.

A Better Way To Deliver VoIP

The incredible potential of voice over IP technology combined with the poor way it has been implemented by most VoIP providers has lead Voxcom to develop a unique, business grade voice service for the Australian market. Voxcom took the best features of voice over IP technology and deployed them over a private, purpose built network. The result is Voxcom’s Voice over Private IP (VoPIP) service. Voxcom’s private network was specifically designed and built to carry voice calls for business customers. Voxcom’s VoPIP service NEVER uses the public Internet for transmission of voice calls. This ensures that Voxcom VoPIP telephone calls have guaranteed quality and security.

A Word About Quality of Service (QoS)

Some VoIP providers claim that carrying voice calls over the public Internet will provide adequate audio quality. Some even claim to offer quality of service (QoS) over the public Internet. These claims are quite simply untrue. While certain hardware bundled with their VoIP services may have QoS capabilities, without an underlying QoS capable network, it is simply not possible to control quality. The public Internet is not a QoS enabled network. Claiming to have QoS on the public Internet is like claiming to never be affected by traffic jams simply because you have a fast car – untrue and quite silly!

Voxcom carries voice calls strictly over its own private network. Because we have full end-to-end control of our private network, we can guarantee the quality and security of your voice calls.